Ceri Radford is Assistant Comment Editor of the Telegraph.

Fighting for the terracotta warriors

I was lucky enough to go along last night to aÂ viewing of The First Emperor, the exhibition of China's terracotta warriors at the British Museum.

Is it art? An infantryman from the terracotta army

I loved it. And so, with a due sense of trepidation, I'm going to have to disagree with my colleague Damian Thompson's thoughts on the matter. To recap, Damian wroteÂ last week that:

"I was dismayed by Dame Jessica's unwillingness to address the points I made about China's disgusting foreign policy and persecution of Christians. She seemed to think these were irrelevant to the First Emperor exhibition. I disagree."

But what does China's foreign policy persecution of Christians have to do with the artifacts of China's first emperor, who died 200 years before Jesus was born? Is there really some kind of damning continuum between the foreign policy of the emperor, Qin Shi Huang, which as far as I can tell consisted of building a bloody big wall to keep outsiders at bay, and, say, China's currentÂ dubious dealingsÂ in Africa?

Perhaps Damian's point is rather that it is distasteful for London to choose to host such an exhibition given China's current behavior, but in that case shouldn't the British Museum chuck out its mummies because of Hosni Mubarak's human rights abuses? Should we ban Jackson Pollock paintings because of Guantanamo Bay?

Whatever your view on contemporary China, the exhibition was a fascinating, intoxicating window into a world that I imagine would be almost as alien to a modern Shanghai urbanite as it was to me.

Before reaching the warriors themselves, visitors view artefacts which reveal the awesome extent and expertise of Qin Shi Huang's rule, which unified eight warring states into the gargantuan precursor of modern China in 221 BC.

The warriors are all the more overpowering precisely because of the historical context which is presented alongside: the fact that Qin Shi Huang had 7,000 of them built to protect him in the afterlife, and that thousands of conscripts died toiling for one man's zany megalomania.

According to the journalist Igor Toronyi-Lalic, they are 'mediocre and devoid of artistic merit.' Well yes, perhaps if you view them as isolated aesthetic objects sealed within a historical vacuum, but what a sterile way to treat archeology. Surely context is what gives such items meaning, and emotion.

I will never forget, for example, visiting the soviet sculpture park outside Budapest. In a ramshackle suburb, the vast granite idols of communist rule that once loomed over the city centre lay discarded amid weeds and gravel. As sculptures, they too were probably 'mediocre', but as real, physical testimony to history they were staggering. The same goes for the warriors.